- Felicity Harber inadvertently used ChatGPT to fight appeal in a tax tribunal
- She cited nine cases which ha been created by an artificial intelligence bot
A woman who used an AI bot to defend herself in a court case against the taxman has lost her appeal against a £3,265 tax bill.
Felicity Harber cited nine court rulings to support he appeal against a fine for not paying capital gains tax on an investment property she had sold.
All nine of the rulings she relied on were fake and were made up by an AI bot, such as ChatGPT.
Five of the fake rulings to successful defences using mental health issues. The remaining four offered prior cases involving ignorance of the law.
Felicity Harber cited nine court rulings to support he appeal against a fine for not paying capital gains tax on an investment property she had sold
The tribunal ruled that Harber was unaware that the cases she had cited in her defence were created by artificial intelligence
The court heard Harber purchased a property for £135,000 in 2006 and rented it out to tenants. In October 2018 Harber sold the house for £252,000 – leaving her with a capital gains tax liability of £16,300 – which she failed to pay.
The case in front of the first-tier tribunal tax chamber heard that Harber was unaware that the judgements she was relying on in her appeal were fake and invented by an AI chatbot.
The prosecution’s legal team tried to find the cases cited on judicial databases but were unsuccessful. After noting the American spelling in some of the cases and the repeated use of unusual phrases they discovered that a chatbot had been used.
The tribunal heard Harber was assisted in her appeal ‘by a friend who worked in a solicitor’s office’.
After discovering her defence had been created using an AI Chatbot, Harber asked the Tribunal how could they be confident that the cases cited by HMRC were genuine.
The Tribunal said: ‘HMRC had provided the full copy of each of those judgments and not simply a summary, and the judgments were also available on publicly accessible websites such as that of the FTT and the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (“BAILLI”). Mrs Harber had been unaware of those websites.’
Judge Anne Redston ruled: ‘We acknowledge that providing fictitious cases in reasonable excuse tax appeals is likely to have less impact on the outcome than in many other types of litigation, both because the law on reasonable excuse is well-settled, and because the task of a tribunal is to consider how that law applies to the particular facts of each appellant’s case.
‘But that does not mean that citing invented judgments is harmless. It causes the tribunal and HMRC to waste time and public money, and this reduces the resources available to progress the cases of other court users who are waiting for their appeals to be determined.’
Judge Reston also quoted a recent warning by the Solicitors’ Registration Authority: ‘All computers can make mistakes. AI language models such as ChatGPT, however, can be more prone to this. That is because they work by anticipating the text that should follow the input they are given, but do not have a concept of “reality”. The result is known as ‘hallucination’, where a system produces highly plausible but incorrect results.”
By Daily Mail Online, December 13, 2023